 February 2001: William D. Baker, 66, killed four people and himself at a Navistar International engine plant in Chicago area suburb, Melrose Park.
HIS RELIGION…?

 July 2003: New York City councilman Othniel Askew, 81, opened fire at City hall in killing one person – a fellow councilman and political rival.
HIS RELIGION…?

 August 2003: Salvador Tapia, 36, opened fire at a Chicago, Illinois auto supply warehouse where he used to work, killing six of its nine employees, including two of the company’s principals.
HIS RELIGION…?

 September 2009: Researcher Annie Le’s body is found strangled, stuffed in the wall of a research center at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Her fellow Lab technician, Raymond Clark, 24, is arrested for her murder.
HIS RELIGION…?

 November, 2009: Jason Rodriguez, 40, a former employee of the engineering firm killed one person dead and injured five.
HIS RELIGION…?

Because he is a Muslim and that fits into our stereotype of Muslims as violent and terrorists? What else could make him snap except for his religion?

I’m not saying his religion is NOT a factor. I’m just saying until we know it’s a factor…we should leave it out.

We continuously try to distance ourselves from people in our stereotype who do unsocial things.

Nobody in the suburbs wants to be associated with the group of kids who spray Nazi symbols on a Synagogue…

I, as a black person, definitely do not want to be associated with gang bangers…

Yet we label ALL Muslims terrorists because a minority of Muslims subscribe to a terrorist ideology. Were Muslims behind the bombings in the UK/Northern Ireland conflict? Nope – just Protestants and Catholics fighting.

Is Pope Sylvester II a terrorist? At the end of the tenth century he “entreated the church universal to succor the church of Jerusalem, and to redeem a sepulcher which the prophet Isaiah had said should be a glorious one, and which the sons of the destroyer Satan were making inglorious.

The Turks were apparently pillaging the Holy Land…and this could not be allowed. So we got the Crusades, and of course these soldiers of religion went over to the Middle East and planted flowers…

The Muslims did not enslave thousands of blacks in the New World and try to Christianize the natives with whips and bondage! The people who were throwing shackled slaves overboard in the Atlantic to lighten their ships were NOT Muslims either!

Muslims did not rule South Africa under apartheid…

I believe all these atrocities were perpetrated by Christians…with a Bible in one hand!

Yet when these Bible loving souls open fire and kill people, we don’t say they are Baptists or Catholics, DO WE?

Fanatics occur in every religion…and Christianity has had and still has its fair share!

One British newspaper reports Hasan once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats. According to the paper Hasan also told colleagues at America’s top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire.

Thanks Britain. The Inca, the Maya, Native people in Australia, China and wherever you ventured during your “Conquests” think you were as bad, if not worse. I don’t think anyone will argue that you did not “terrorize” them…us. My Caribbean island was enslaved by you, too.

By the way, according to government figures, workplace killings are trending downwards. But apparently the current weak economy has boosted stress levels in many workplaces. Add to this the normal or abnormal levels of combat stress among the military, and we get incidents like the Fort Hood shooting.

It might be easier to blame Islam than taking a retrospective look at a military super-macho culture where admitting to stress is considered weak; a military that does not have enough avenues to deal with and recognize combat stress; an army that is overstretched/over-deployed…where commanders do not listen to soldiers who say they don’t want to return to combat situations, but will deploy you regardless.

(People try to kill themselves to get out of deployments or the military – but the military deploys them anyway. How many red, green, yellow, purple flags do you need?)

Easier to simply blame Islam (which may or may not be blameless)!

I suppose those soldiers who come home and kill their spouses/lovers were all Muslims, too?

I know nothing about ISLAM except what I too see/hear in the media. It is not a religion I want to follow. But it’s not the only one I don’t want to follow!

Like this:

I didn’t watch the triumphant homecoming of Laura Ling and Euna Lee…the two journalists who were jailed in North Korea, since March.

The TV was playing in the background so I know they arrived.

I’m sure their relatives, friends, employers are happy to see them and I would too, in their place.

What I care about right now is bringing home military personnel captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m all for evacuating nationals when there’s a disaster, a coup, a plague etc. And I don’t like it, either, when fellow journalists get captured on the job. We expect these journalists to take risks, to get up close and dodge bullets so those of us at home can know what’s happening in these remote locations.

My struggle is: (1) How indebted should your country be to you when you break another country’s rules, enter forbidden territory and knowingly take risks? We lose out when journalists are not there, taking those risks, but how far should they go – how far do we want/expect them to go? Are they working for the country – or their network? Don’t they often get more money and greater prestige the more risks they take? It’s nice when the government steps in…but should it always?

(2) Whom do we treat as “real” journalists? New York Times reporters? What if it’s a blogger, who may or may not be a journalist…like me?

In listening to the commentary about the freed journalists, some people say this just gives countries like North Korea the leverage to act badly and get rewarded with a high profile visit from a powerhouse like former president Bill Clinton. They claim it will embolden the Irans of the world to try similar stunts.

To me, all this attention, diplomacy, time and money spent negotiating these releases (plane was paid for privately) should now be focussed on military personnel who are missing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

23-year-old Bowe Bergdahl, disappeared from his base in Afghanistan (July 2009), and was later seen in a Taliban video posted online. Bergdahl was serving with an infantry regiment at Fort Richardson in Anchorage. Where is he?

Dianne Feinstein, of course (the Senator from California) speaking as a politician, says: American citizens are in trouble overseas – we must rescue American citizens in trouble overseas? Really? If Americans go to China and take part in anti-government protests that the Chinese say is illegal, and officials sweep them up, we must rescue them, too? Where does it stop?

If religious people rush to Iraq to impose their version of God on the Muslims, and are arrested, should we go free them? I think Jesus will come and free them, since they’re doing his work, not the state’s…and if he doesn’t free them, like he did for Paul, (and Silas, Acts 16:25-28) then he either (a) just doesn’t support what they’re doing and couldn’t care less or (b) it’s his will that they sit in that prison and convert the prisoners.

On the other hand:

Why don’t we just say it’s a game we’re playing with whichever country happens to be holding the hostages, and that even if it was Ronald McDonald, we’d want him back!?

If we manage, through our offensives – charm or military – to free hostages, then it looks like we’ve won! AND, if it brings North Korea to the negotiating table, then send strategic “hostages” to every troublesome corner of the globe! I’ll support that!

One U.S. official says President Clinton talked to North Koreans about the “positive things that could flow” from freeing the two women”. Some analysts apparently think now that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has gotten his high-profile visit from a former president (he didn’t want a former VICE-president, and turned Al Gore down) that could open the way to direct nuclear disarmament talks.